On her trips through India to teach about the Baha’i Faith, Martha Root noted that many people could recite the poetry of Tahirih. Among the people she may have met was the great poet Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore.
Using information from her 1930 trip to Iran where she met Tahirih’s family, she began a short biography, Tahirih, The Pure. In early March, 1938, she finished this book at the home of the first Baha’i of Hindu background, N.R. Vakil.
Martha Root had 3,000 copies of it printed in Karachi and mailed many to prominent Indians. The book was translated into Persian, Czech, Urdu, and Japanese. In Urdu, it went through at least three editions.
Martha Root had hoped that Tahirih and the Baha’i teachings would become better known this way and wrote that she hoped friends would speak about Tahirih in all possible venues so that Tahirih would go on a, “…teaching tour around the world….”
